Vampire Weekend – review

Friday 3 May 2013 12.48 EDT
First published on Friday 3 May 2013 12.48 EDT

Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig has a curious tone of voice that renders even a comment as benign as "You seem like a nice group of people" mildly sarcastic. For a band of this level of popularity (they closed their 2010 tour with two nights at Alexandra Palace), the New Yorkers are unusually slippery, zigzagging between sincerity and irony without spelling out the difference. It suggests a lot of playful self-confidence that they chose to blend new wave, hip-hop and afro-pop while dressed as preppies, trusting fans to work out where they were coming from.

They have had success because they channel all this wit and subtlety into irresistible pop songs, full of youth and spring, which sound better every time they play thanks largely to the growing power of drummer Chris Thomson. There's nothing fancy about their appearance tonight. The backdrop is flower-patterned like a summer dress, and Koenig and shimmying bassist Chris Baio wear white shirts and black trousers, like schoolboys who have just removed their ties. The lighting, however, is as deft and impactful as Thomson's drumming. During I Stand Corrected, it snaps back and forth between a single floor-mounted beam illuminating Koenig's face, and a fierce barrage of white spotlights. For Giving Up the Gun, the stage flashes red like an infernal disco.

Their third album, Modern Vampires of the City, due out in a few days, is hugely impressive, bustling with new ideas and sharp reflections on getting older. Diane Young, a tremendous jolt of malfunctioning rock'n'roll, crackles with fun, like an updated version of Marty McFly introducing Hill Valley High to Johnny B Goode. Step's ballroom hip-hop and the grandly ambitious Ya Hey, however, are still bedding in. Occasionally, the band become entangled in complicated arrangements: Diplomat's Son's enigmatic electro-funk winds up chasing its own tail.

Vampire Weekend never seem phased, though, and they always have the simpler pleasures of A-Punk and traditional set-closer Walcott to fall back on. While it's the crisp, breezy early songs that get the Troxy pogoing, their experimental instincts have enabled them to comfortably outgrow their gilded youth. You get the feeling they'll be even more persuasive the next time they play London. It is, after all, "a very Vampire Weekendy kind of city," says Koenig. It sounds as if he means it.